


learn to live with living with

by Aezlo



Series: Rest and Recovery [5]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alien Biology, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Nightmares, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, bad emotional regulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25434151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: Entrapta and Hordak make their way back to the Crypto Castle post-meeting with the Princess Alliance with some things to think about, and some new problems to solve.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: Rest and Recovery [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1786942
Comments: 25
Kudos: 101





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a series, and you should probably read the previous stuff before you start here.

On the way to Brightmoon, they’d mostly followed the coast around the mountains that hid the Heart and almost avoided the Whispering Woods entirely by coming in from the west. However, if they truly want to avoid the shifting woods, it looks like they’ll have to take the ocean route. Entrapta doesn’t have any seafaring vessels available at the moment, but it’s something to consider for the future. For the route home, they’re heading south, directly through the Whispering Woods so that they can make a stop at the Fright Zone.

Hordak’s driving the transport currently as he tends to drive a little slower than her, which is useful in a territory where the land can shift unexpectedly, leaving you nearly driving headfirst into trees or rocks regularly. Entrapta’s lying over the back of a crate, holding her data pad over her face with her hair as she squints at the diagrams for her construction bots. She’s trying to figure out how best to mobilize them for a water environment, as well as considering the fact that Mermista will probably not be as accepting of the blocky horde-type architecture that the bots currently build. She’s going to have to create a new interface and potentially offer more options for people to customize the architecture that the bots build. Although, maybe just the basic horde-blocks would work to begin with, and could be built up into architecture better fitting their environments later?

She shuffles upright, as she’s starting to get a kink in her shoulder. Her mind is starting to gloss over the details of what she’s looking at too, skipping around and choosing to think about random other projects, so... time for a break.

Hector and Emily are playing some sort of game of their own design, something like eye-spy with Emily throwing up random images that she’s captured and Hector calling out something in the image, causing Emily to whirr and then pull up another image. Entrapta’s not sure exactly how it works, but they seem to be having fun. She watches them for a moment with a small smile, before heading up to the front of the transport.

She settles into the co-pilot’s seat, and Hordak’s ear flicks slightly as he loops around a trunk and rock that appear out of nowhere. According to the map on the dash, they’re within a mile or two of clearing the forest and hopefully, if the forest hasn’t completely turned them around, near the Fright Zone. She’s not sure how she feels about returning to the Fright Zone after all this time, and Hordak’s reticence is likely due to the same thing.

She’d visited the Fright Zone after talking to Scorpia and reviewing the footage on Emily’s hard drive before Prime started attacking. No one knew what had happened to Hordak or Catra, or even seemed to care... all of the focus had been on getting Glimmer back. She’d later learned that Bow had seen Hordak get called up by Prime while attacking Glimmer, and then Double Trouble had taken the time to obsequiously introduce themself by pretending to be Hordak just to see her reaction. She had not been amused, especially as the shapeshifter mimed out a Hordak in grief complete with overwrought tears once he had learned of her suspected death. She was fairly sure that they were overacting as she couldn’t picture Hordak crying, honestly. Did the clones even have lacrimal ducts?

She’d already known Hordak was in trouble by that point, though. She’d visited the Fright Zone herself and found her crystal tossed aside in the foundry, chunks of Hordak’s armor cabling and plating littering the floor. She hadn’t known what to think, really, just collected the pieces left behind, took the data that she could gather, and left before her friends would notice that she was gone.

They break through the forest finally, the transport lurching upwards on a slight incline before dipping back down and Hordak grunts as he works to stabilize the vehicle. He continues forward, though he seems to consider his former stronghold with a conflicted look before grimacing and adjusting the gearshift to a higher speed now that they’re on territory that won’t shift around them.

Hector apparently notices the change in speed, because he and Emily trot up to peer at the scenery in front of them as well.

“This is the Fright Zone?” he asks, scanning the green towers littered with pipes, deep chasms spilling out yellow light, and everything now crowned with slightly browned and rotting greenery.

“Yes,” Hordak grunts, gunning the transport over a chasm and causing everyone’s stomachs to collectively drop for a moment before they stabilize over the next slab of pipes and constructs. It’s clear that he’s exquisitely familiar with traversing the area like this as he pops over and around a few other shortcuts that Entrapta wouldn’t have thought to, leading them to the remains of his ship where his sanctum used to be. He parks the vehicle next to a raised platform, and sighs slightly, looking down at the unpowered dash for a moment like he’s steeling himself. She’s about to reach over and pat a hair-hand on him comfortingly when he lurches up, pulling a cable from his chair to get it to follow him in the same way that Emily could be leashed.

He’s agreed to not wear the vambrace on his right arm until the bruising healed with some disgruntlement, and so he was using his chair more. He seems to have regained more stability, perhaps with walking around more with the cane’s help, and as they walk into the halls of the Fright Zone, he mostly walks next to his chair, occasionally using it to steady or adjust himself.

The halls of the Fright Zone are now cracked and changed from the last time they were here together. Something has seared a crooked line through the roof, and plants and water have dripped in, rusting and changing the metal and stone of the walls. She-Ra’s rejuvenation hasn’t stuck quite as well here as it has elsewhere, much like Dryl’s dry thunderstorms are slowly causing flashfires that are destroying the jungles, here the acid rain and smog-induced lack of sunlight has choked back the shrubs and trees. She was pretty sure the Fright Zone had originally been a desert, too, so it was a little confusing that the restored-Etheria magic had chosen temperate forests to place here. Had someone studied the change in ecology that She-Ra’s magic had wrought? Was there a logic to how it had splayed over the planet?

Hordak pauses at the entrance to his sanctum for a moment, just looking at it. The door here has a similar rend through it, like someone with a giant laser cutter had lost control of their tool. He sighs and pushes the door open, physically chucking the partially-cut piece out of the way with a low growl, like it personally offended him.

She's thinking about asking what happened, why Hordak's sanctum looks like this, but there’s a tension to Hordak’s shoulders as he stalks into the dark of his sanctum and stomps up his stairs past his throne. Hector gives her a worried look, his green eyes and mouth glittering eerily in the dimness, and she tries to give him a fortifying smile.

“We’re just gonna get another copy of Hordak’s data backups because mine got corrupted, and pick up some things. Okay?” Hector gives her a small smile and nod, and they follow Hordak up past his throne, Hector curiously eying the huge green seat that's only partially lit up with faulty, broken lights.

They come up on Hordak glowering at a triptych of screens, the one in the center damaged and dimmed. The rest show out-of-date maps, data scrawling all over them announcing that connections to transports, troops, and outposts cannot be made, please check the connections. She’d been curious about it when she’d visited last time. The triptych wasn’t really Hordak’s style. He seemed to prefer a worktable crowned by screens and this display seemed like it was more for presentation, for someone else besides Hordak. But who?

As she steps closer, to maybe figure out what exactly on the screens might have grabbed Hordak’s attention, she sees his profile caught in an ugly snarl, a low rumbling growl in his chest that startles her as it suddenly peaks up and he lunges forward to tear apart the triptych. His claws are not sharp, but when the dull talons are applied with significant force, it’s clearly very deadly. She squeaks and starts back as the triptych quickly becomes a number of hunks of useless metal and glass, lobbed around the sanctum with vitriol. He’s strong, even without the armor; something she’d also definitely known before this... but after a month and a half of Hordak lying in sickbeds and being too weak to stand, she may have forgotten about it. Just a little.

“I should have _known_ ,” he snarls, stomping heavily on the center panel of the triptych so that the display finally gives out, cracking and splintering down the middle. “Just like Shadow Weaver, _lying_ for her own gain,” he stalks past the detritus of the panels, deeper into the sanctum and another piece of newly destroyed machinery flies through the sanctum. Hector yips as some mechanical bits splash back at him and Emily, although they’re nowhere near enough to be a danger. Entrapta stays back, a little shocked and overwhelmed by this reaction at first. She distantly hears more quiet snarls about Hordak’s own stupidity, why had he trusted _her_ , how he should’ve sent _her_ to Beast Island instead of the Crimson Waste in the first place. Entrapta just tries to process and reorient herself in the present for a moment.

“Hordak!” Entrapta darts forward once she clicks back into reality, a few cables dinging off of her mask on her head as Hordak heaves something large from overhead and lobs it deeper into the sanctum, into his giant, ill-coordinated stacks of junk. He turns towards her, his chest heaving and his eyes glittering a brilliant red-orange. His expression is guarded, and the rage is only barely banked, but it’s not pointed at her.

“It is good that you are alive,” he growls with a curled snarl, a terrible threat to someone not here, and… and finally the pieces interlock in her head.

It was Catra. He and Catra had fought once he’d realized that she had tried to kill Entrapta, had exiled her to Beast Island. He had destroyed his home in the process, sure of her death in what he knew to be a deadly area. Perhaps Double Trouble’s imitation had been closer to the truth than she’d given them credit for, especially given the fact that there’s angry or frustrated tears welled in Hordak’s eyes at the moment.

And, Hordak is _currently_ destroying his lab because he's angry at himself for believing Catra’s lies… she thinks, at least. She’ll have to check once her brain stops thundering over this revelation.

It makes sense. Of course it makes sense. Hordak generally makes sense. Generally, when there isn’t weird clone stuff involved. She had thought that maybe the crystal had come out when he fought Glimmer, but it had shown signs of being ripped from its casing. Glimmer tends to punch and _push_ , but the armor was built to withstand that sort of thing. But Catra? Catra would know to pull and rip at a weak point. For some reason, the image of Hordak having her crystal stripped from him by Catra makes her heart seize, more than anything else that she’s just figured out.

She’s crying, and she hadn’t really noticed it for a moment, but it rears its ugly head as she heaves a giant breath to try to say something and she’s suddenly very aware of the sloppy, blubbering tears that smear her face. She hates crying, hates the headache and the puffiness, and how helpless it makes her feel. She can’t really remember the last time that she really cried because of how hard she tries to avoid it, but perhaps seeing Hordak so angry and realizing how deeply he’d grieved and hurt… 

“Entrapta? Did I—are you alright?” Hordak turns towards her, or it seems like he does from what little she can see through her tear-blurred vision. She lunges herself at him, crawling up him to hug his shoulders and face and he stumbles back a bit in surprise before finding something to support him. He shifts a little, his head leaning into the curl of her neck and shoulder and she starts at the zing of his skin against hers. He tentatively curls an arm around her bottom to support her, and uses his other arm to pull her tightly to him around her back. She expects to make a surprised squeak, but what comes out is a gasping sob, and her hair curls tighter around him.

“I am sorry to have frightened you,” he rumbles into the cloth on her shoulder after they both seem to have calmed down a little.

She can’t really articulate right now, so she just uses her whole body to shake a sort of ‘no,’ and she can feel the tug of a smile on his cheek against her neck. The scales, she actually notices them this time, are sort of grounding in a way, a gentle tug if she brushes along them a certain way. She pulls off her right glove and digs her hand under his turtleneck to pet up and down the scales along the side of his neck. It’s smooth and almost soft going one way, but pulls slightly going the other, and the way they knit together and pull against her skin changes depending on where the scales are on his body.

“Entrapta?” Hordak calls, and she finds herself up to her elbow in his turtleneck now as she’s diving down to his collar bones to explore the different textures, and she starts as she realizes that they’re face-to-face and he’s giving her a confused look. “Are you alright?”

“Uh,” she blushes deeply, caught out doing something that she perhaps shouldn’t be doing. “Uh.”

“I’m going to set you down. Is that alright?” he quirks a brow and she nods with her mouth still slightly agape. She still hasn’t pulled her arm back, but as he begins to move her downward, she pulls her hair and other more fleshy appendages back to herself.

She feels wobbly on her feet, but her hair catches her and she gives herself a full body shake, wrapping a few tendrils around herself protectively as she still feels very vulnerable and tender.

“You didn’t scare me,” she states, as Hordak slowly pushes himself up from the junk he’d settled on. She stares at the ground in front of Hordak’s boots for a moment, trying to figure out how to articulate what she wants to say, verbalize her epiphany. She pets along her ponytail to sooth herself, her brow furrowing. “You fought Catra,” she starts.

Hordak stiffens and the anger so recently abated rises sharp and hot to the surface, but he takes a deep breath and settles himself back down on the junk pile with a low grumble. His eyes flick past her, to where Hector and Emily likely are watching them based on the refracted glow of green and magenta that she can see. “She lied,” he states scathingly, “if I had known…” He sighs deeply, looking away from her, deeper into the sanctum.

“You thought…?” Entrapta’s voice is embarrassingly nasally and brittle. She hates crying.

Hordak’s ear flicks, and he turns back to her, “You… joined the Alliance. Left… me—er, left—left the horde.”

“Oh,” Entrapta nods, “Oh, that makes sense.” He frowns at her. “If. If you’d known, you would’ve come? You would’ve come to Beast Island? You would’ve?” the words jumble out of her mouth, and she leans towards him earnestly.

He holds out a hand, palm up, in case she unsteadies herself and she places a hair tendril in it tentatively. He smiles softly, “Of course.”

She releases a huge exhale that she hadn’t realized she had been holding. “Oh wow, oh great, oh good,” she vibrates, “Okay. Okay.”

“You are… important to me, Entrapta,” Hordak offers softly, a thumb rubbing along her hair in his hand.

“Good,” Entrapta grins manically, locking eyes with him, and he snorts softly. “Come on, uh,” she gently tugs the tendril in his hand, and his brows quirk in interest, “let’s get that data!”

* * *

They forgot to bring better data cables, so the full transfer of the updated horde databases takes a few hours. With what had apparently been Catra’s displays no longer in Hordak’s work area, he seems more subdued, rubbing a shoulder tenderly but insisting that he did not overexert himself in his rage. She’s pretty sure he’s lying, but he seems limber and isn’t hissing or seizing up as he moves around in the chair.

Entrapta picks through some of the junk deeper in the inner sanctum, curious if she can find some pieces of armor or any other useful parts. She now has her modified suit schematic, or, well, she will once the data fully transfers, but she needs to make some modifications to it, and it’ll be helpful to have some pieces to start with.

Hector and Hordak stay behind while she and Emily pick and prod through the years of Hordak’s hoarding. Hector doesn’t have steel-toed boots like she and Hordak do, so it’s best for him to stay out of the stacks. She can hear them talking, a bit stiltedly at first as Hector was a bit alarmed at Hordak’s roaring outburst, but it sounds like they’ve returned to a somewhat normal banter. She can’t follow the thread of the conversation from this far away, so perhaps she should’ve left Emily with them in case they end up discussing alien life forms again? She can always ask Hordak about their conversation later, she supposes.

Her data pad chimes as the upload finishes, and she hears Hector’s voice effuse something, but she doesn’t catch the words.

“It’s done?” she emerges from the dark to find Hordak running a few diagnostics. They’re fairly certain that hosting a version of Prime’s neural network on her data pad is what ended up corrupting the data last time. There just wasn’t enough room to maintain the integrity of all her data caches while working with that. This time, she’s also taking a second copy on a hard disk to upload on the Crypto Castle’s drives for safe keeping.

“Yes,” Hordak replies, as the diagnostic dings and shows a cute icon of Entrapta giving the victory sign. She titters at his fond smile, and the hard disk backup completes in the background too.

“Is it true that Etherians do not see well in these light conditions, Entrapta?” Hector asks, quirking his head, and gesturing towards the dark she’s just emerged from.

“Oh. Well! I suppose it depends on the race of the Etherian, but humans like myself would need prosthetics like my mask to see in the dark,” she taps her mask on her forehead. “I _thought_ you had low-light vision,” she peers smugly at Hordak, and he just shrugs a little.

Hector and Hordak chatter a bit about the various races of Etheria and their constitutions as they begin collecting up and carting boxes and the like out. Hordak’s unusually yielding, likely due to feeling a bit guilty due to his outburst earlier, but as they come to the end of the things they’re dragging out of the sanctum, he pauses and hangs back a bit.

“Did you think of something else that you wanted to take back to the Crypto Castle?” Entrapta asks, boosting herself up on her hair and swinging a little. Hector adjusts the box of bolts and junk in his arms next to her as he turns to look back at Hordak as well.

“I…” Hordak pauses, leaning a little against a column, “I should stay and begin the process of dismantling this place.”

Entrapta blinks at him for a few seconds. “But. We need to get those refrigerated goods back to the Crypto Castle. We can come back!”

Hordak frowns at her for a moment. “You can go back to the Crypto Castle. I need to restore—”

“Hordak, I can’t drive all the way back to the Crypto Castle myself! You know I get distracted and can’t handle driving sometimes!”

He frowns again, and looks away. After a moment, he offers, “Hector could drive.”

Entrapta harrumphs, but she turns to Hector, “Do you know how to drive?” He gives her a very deer-in-the-headlights look and shakes his head. “Do you want to learn how to drive?”

“Sure?” he shrugs.

“Well, you can teach Hector how to drive on the way home. I want to stop by down south and see Prime’s ships! Maybe one’s intact enough that we could just fly it to the Crypto Castle!” she beams, but Hordak is still leaning against a pillar, looking away from them.

“I need to clean all this up,” he sighs, looking back behind him to the darkness of his sanctum and pushing his hair out of his face. “The Alliance is right.”

Entrapta huffs, and plops the box she was carrying into Hector’s hands so that she can scramble over to Hordak. “They didn’t give you a deadline! And how are you going to clean up the entire Fright Zone by yourself? You can’t do this by yourself!” She’s pushed herself up into his eye-range, and he finally turns and tilts his head towards her, levelling her with a glare.

“I will do what needs to be done,” he growls.

Entrapta rears back in frustration, grumbling loudly. “You _could_ , you can! But you don’t have to!” she makes another grumpy noise at herself. “You don’t have your armor, and you’re still not fully through the withdrawal, and if you start now without your armor or without any help, then it’s going to take so much longer and it doesn’t have to! I can—we can send some scouting bots around to survey the damage, and begin dismantling the reactors, and we can—we can do it together! You don’t have to do this alone!” Entrapta lurches forward on her hair, and Hordak’s ears draw back.

“I… I would like to help, too?” Hector offers from the other side of the room, shifting the heavy boxes in his arms still.

Hordak’s eyes tick back to the other clone, and he sighs, shaking himself. “The Alliance will be impatient,” he grumbles, glancing away again.

“I don’t care! The Alliance is busy with their own problems! You have plans, but you need your armor and you need the bots we’ve been making!” Entrapta gestures wide and exasperated with all of her limbs since she’s raised on her hair.

He considers her for a long moment, and it’s a little unnerving due to his lack of blinking. “You should be focusing on—”

“ _Stop_ ,” Entrapta grabs his shoulders, and he startles back enough that he loses his balance against the pillar and destabilizes, nearly falling down. “I’m not leaving you here! Okay? And I’m not staying, so come on," she helps him adjust back to standing on his own two feet with her hair and he furrows his brow at her as he leans back against the pillar.

She doesn’t move to tug or pull him along, but a tendril of her hair is still around his waist from stabilizing him.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” she says softly, peering up at him as he regards her. “Please?”

His mouth twitches, like maybe he wants to smile or smirk, but isn’t able to muster it. “Fine,” he bites, but it’s a rather subdued for a snap from him. He slowly and carefully begins walking towards the exit and Hector with her hair keeping him stable until he reaches his chair.


	2. Chapter 2

Hordak takes them out of the center of the Fright Zone, and continues heading south into the Crimson Waste. It’s sweltering and witheringly hot here, and Entrapta spends some of the rest of the afternoon adding on windows and hacking in a remedial A/C system. It will be nearly icy cold at night, but she’ll likely figure out something for that as well.

Hector sits in the co-pilot seat through the day, watching what his hands and feet are doing unnervingly closely. Hordak had offered to let him sit in the driver’s seat, but he’d been a bit too intimidated by it, and had insisted he just _observe_ for a bit instead.

Once night falls, the windows that Entrapta installed _shunk_ shut and appear to hold in a little of the residual heat of the day to keep them warm. They’ve managed to get through most of the Crimson Waste, but it will still be a few days of traversing mountains and jungles before they make it back to the Crypto Castle.

He's reviewing Entrapta’s designs for the hydrophobic construction bots with a little confusion as Entrapta eats some prepacked food with Hector. She’s been asking him to review and talk through her ideas a lot lately, and they certainly had done that before when they’d worked on the portal, but this seems… different? He can’t put his finger on it exactly, but without the pressure of signaling and returning to Prime weighing on his psyche, it feels more like a choice. He might even go so far as to say that he… enjoys it?

He just wishes he was able to do more for Entrapta, but he’s only ever been purely functional at any of his trades. He could modify and improve an already existing bot, but Entrapta could create one from scratch, could come up with something completely unique and tailored to her and the situation. Her skills are infinitely more useful, especially now.

She moves over to sit next to him on the cot now that she’s finished her meal, and he offers her back her data pad.

“Anything from the scouts today?” she asks, poking a hair tendril towards where he’s set his data pad on his other side.

“Mm,” he sighs, “another one was shot down.” He’d been trying to get this one closer to the Fright Zone to begin surveying it, but it had been shot down somewhere near an abandoned mine on the edge of Dryl’s territory. It’s good to know that the Etherians are surviving in unlikely places and perhaps even taking back some of their old towns and holdings, but it’s frustrating to keep losing bots.

“I really should’ve thought to paint them purple or something,” she scratches her chin in thought with her hair.

“I’ve been working on a prototype that Etherians might find more… appealing, but I’m struggling to make it aerodynamic enough,” he pulls up his design. It is basically a slightly smushed orb with two tiny blades of wings on it, but it’s going to be so heavy that the amount of fuel to keep it in the air makes it unsustainable, and adding more fuel tanks creates more weight, which requires more fuel, which requires... He’s reached a dead end, and has been too tired to revisit and make a stab at a better design.

“Oooh, let me see!” she bounces on her seat next to him, and he smiles a little as he hands her his data pad with the designs on them. She peers at the data pad in deep focus, swiping through the screens of different views and some of his earlier ideas with her tongue stuck out. He leans over, accidentally brushing their arms together on the cot. He’s wearing the vambrace at the moment and he shouldn’t be, but he’s unclipped the problem clasp so that it won’t bother him, and it allows him to not jump or rear back automatically in fear. He’s still getting used to touch, accepting and giving it, and generally touch with Entrapta is fine, but he’s had too many bad experiences with his arms to feel entirely comfortable there.

She wiggles a little in place, furrowing her brow in deep thought, and ends up leaning her arm into his and jiggling for a moment. She’s focused on the schematics in front of her but it looks as if she’s trying to find something or maybe trying to get comfortable? She removes her glove on her left hand thoughtlessly and pats around next to her without looking until she hits where his hand is resting. He tenses at first, but lets his hand relax back against the cot and she distracts him with a question as she uses the pads of her fingers to feel along the knuckles of his hand, “Why don’t you squish the circle a little more, like this?” She demonstrates, using her right hand and a hair-hand to draw the diagram she wants. She ends up with an oblong-plate shaped thing with the same two blades on the sides.

“It could work,” he nods a little, and glances down to see her fingers gently feeling along the sides of his fingers, as if for… growths? He’s not entirely sure what she’s looking for, but she’s doing something exploratory, like she had earlier today in the sanctum after his outburst. Her palpation doesn’t seem medical, although perhaps she’s feeling the thin cybernetic strands woven through his joints and fingers? He finds that he feels a little warm, more so than just from the residual heat of the day, and it appears to have had a rather sudden onset. Perhaps he’s just broken a fever and he’s feeling the heat of it now? Had he been cold before?

“It’d be easy enough to do, just pop off the chassis and slot on the new one, although we might have to make a few changes to the brainbox to make it slimmer,” she hums, and she curls her fingers under his to feel along the underside of his ring and little finger. He huffs faintly, his blush deepening, but it seems that she’s using the curling of her fingers around his in the same way that she sometimes uses tapping and twirling. He keeps his hand lax, and thankfully with it rested against the cot and slightly entangled with Entrapta’s bare hand, the faint tremoring is not particularly bothersome.

“How about that?” she turns the data pad towards him to show her changes, and he takes the device back with his left hand.

“It does not resemble Prime or my bots,” he nods, and his lip quirks as she gently turns his hand over and appears to mindlessly feel along the inside of his palm. She pauses, and her eyes slowly drop down to what her hand is doing and she starts a little, but doesn’t make a move to remove her hand. He tilts his head at her in question, and her eyes trail around his face away from his eyes as she firmly grips and entangles their hands like he’s seen some Etherians do.

“Is this okay?” she asks, her fingers wriggling a little in his lax hold. “I know sometimes really light touch is bothersome to me, and I don’t—I don’t know…” she trails off. He furrows his brow and considers their intertwined hands, flexing his fingers very gently so that they knit together a little better.

“It does not bother me,” he offers, his eyes soft as his large thumb feels along the metal of her artificial thumb. She beams up at him, and the blush he feels on his cheeks must spread to his ears based on the fact that they now feel hot as well.

She continues holding his hand for a bit as they review the new schematics, considering material weight and the amount of rework time it’ll take for those that they’ve already created. She yawns wide at some point, using a hair-hand to stifle it, and they finally give in and release each other’s hands and begin gearing up for bed.

Hector’s already deeply asleep, snoring faintly with one of his clawed hands palmed over Emily’s dome as if seeking reassurance that she’s where he expects her to be. Entrapta settles on her cot wedged against the wall behind his own, as she seems to prefer being against a wall. He understands, it’s more strategically safe, really. One less side of the room for someone to attack you from.

He settles into his own bed, lying on his back and tossing on and off the flimsy blankets a few times before he manages to settle into a comfortable enough temperature to drift off to sleep.

* * *

_He’s looking for someone. He’s not sure who, but he calls out a few times and his voice echoes back at him. It’s dark here, but he’ll know them when he sees them, he just needs to get to the light. Where are they?_

_He pushes through something, the walls here are close and tight, claustrophobic around him but he rips and claws and pushes through. He has to get somewhere. He will not be held here._

_He stumbles forward and finds himself in a large white room, filled with row after row of identical clones, all staring forward expressionless at a raised platform. He presses forward, manhandling his brothers a little as he pushes through the crowd. He pauses as he recognizes the event, elbowing past a clone and staring at the raised dais in the center of the room. He’s never been to an Ascension, though he’s seen them in the hivemind’s memories. It’s the only way that he recognizes this for what it is._

_Prime is speaking, though Hordak can’t seem to understand his words. His voice is a little different, a few catches in the vocal cords and the grooves in his cheek and chin are deeper than he’s seen before. There may be a fifth and sixth eye beginning to press forth and forming around his right eye, too, based on the strange discoloration there. There is a clone next to him, a few steps behind him, his hands held in front of him with his face blank but for a placid smile. Seeing the future vessel makes Hordak’s gut twist, but he can’t explain why. Is this who he’s looking for?_

_He’s managed to push his way through the crowd of his unmoving brethren so that he’s standing at the front of the crowd, near the stairs up to the dais. He’s dimly aware that he’s in his old armor, his old Etherian horde regalia. It’s not as heavy though, he moves as easily as if it were… were a different armor. He stands out like a sore thumb against the sea of perfect clones, but he looks up at the proceedings as entranced as they are._

_Prime calls out something joyous to the crowd, and all the clones respond, even himself; some uniform call and response from thousands of throats. Prime grabs the clone on the dais by the hip and pulls him to his chest to stare down possessively at him. The clone shivers at his regard and Prime smiles and caresses his soon-to-be vessel’s face._

_Someone whines unhappily... it feels like it might be Hordak. He needs to gain better control of himself._

_Prime shoves the clone towards the front of the dais without warning, almost causing the hapless thing to fall down the stairs into Hordak’s arms. Hordak shares a look with the clone for a moment, a millisecond of shared terror before the clone’s face folds into placidity again. Hordak’s eyes widen, and he lurches up as he sees Prime’s tentacles arc up behind the clone. He shouts a warning, tripping and scrabbling up the stairs to try to stop this, but the scene warps, and Prime’s roughly gripping his face and bowing his head to dip into Hordak’s mind. The talon caps bite into the sensitive skin behind his ears, and apologies are dripping and drooling unbidden from his lips._

_He feels the jolt in his chest as the hivemind comes alive again, and Prime, who he’d never had the glory, the privilege, of being so near before this is a being of utter enormity up close. Hordak is beheld by this creature exuding brilliant green light which slips and slides into his mind at first but quickly becomes a relentless deluge against his entire self, dripping into his darkest corners. Prime consumes Hordak in seconds, all of him, from beginning to end, top to bottom; the shame of how long he’s had a name, the constant pain of his defect, the sharp ache of grief and loss of Entrapta, everything, his entire life read, understood, and judged unworthy immediately. Pain bursts from the port in his neck, and he is gone and stripped within seconds. Some part of him quivers at the devastation of his self, marvels at the raw power at show here and his powerlessness in the face of it. The ease in which Prime smooths him perfect again is awe-inspiring. He is nothing. He is pure._

_He blinks, and he is staring down at a woman—Entrapta, he’s staring down at Entrapta with his cannon raised and primed to fire. His limbs feel fizzly and strange, like he’s just been through a third or fourth purification ritual in too little time, and he cannot fathom what he’s been asked to do but the directive is burning in his mind like a brand. Prime sees all, knows all, and you will obey Prime or suffer the consequences, little brother._

_“Hordak,” she weeps, her face scrunched in grief and anguish._

_He can’t do this. He won’t-he can’t-he won’t-he—_

_“Dispose of her,” Prime’s voice rings in his head, and he feels power curl and rend through the port in the base of his neck._

_His fingers curl around the trigger without any regard for his personal want, a green blaze of power steadying his arm and glowering down at the woman beneath them with his own eyes. “Be at peace, little rebel,” and the words come from his own mouth with a vicious smirking snarl._

_He feels the cannon discharge on his arm, the recoil straining his bandaged arm, and someone screams._

He wakes with a start, one of his hands digging into the flesh around his cerebral port sharply, but he quickly curls up, clutching at his chest and keening quietly. His hearts are racing, and the weaker one is off-beat, missing every other beat, sometimes every other-other beat, with a sharp ripping pain each time. It’s too painful for him to think for a moment, too painful for him to marshal his thoughts and deal with this rationally. He just cries and rocks in a ball, prays that this isn’t his third heart attack. It doesn’t quite feel like one, but please, _please_. He has no surgery machine to lurch into this time, slam and claw at the controls, beg and hope that it will keep him alive. He does not want to die here like this.

Once his brain is no longer jangling around useless and panicky in his head, he focuses on slowing his breathing. The air here is as thick with magic as it is everywhere on Etheria these days, but he gulps it in anyway.

After some time of breathing and stilling himself, it still hurts, and his skin feels tight, but his weaker heart is missing fewer beats, matching or near-matching the stronger one as it slows. He feels wrung out and exhausted, trembling all over, shaky with the adrenaline or the pain.

He opens his bleary eyes to the dark of the inside of the transport, and releases another shaky exhale. He’s not alone, which in some ways is scarier than the alternative. Hector’s mouth glows faintly across the transport as he snores, pointed towards the wall. Entrapta he can’t see, but he can hear her softly snoring as well.

He does not particularly want to return to sleep at the moment, even though he is even more tired than earlier. He slowly pushes himself upright, and scrubs his face. He’s covered in a layer of sweat again; he will need to clean himself before he settles back to sleep.

He pushes himself off of the cot, his hands shaking terribly and a soft trembling noise in his throat. He’s gone through this before, and the weakness and the soft whimpers are not quite so alarming this time. One time that he had… whatever sort of attack this was, Imp had coiled himself into the hollow of his throat and thrummed so loudly that he’d been sure that the entire Fright Zone could hear it.

He leans back against the crate, and holds his face for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose and pressing against his eyes, just letting himself mourn the little creature. Imp had been an ill-advised creation, but… he’d been his and his alone.

Hordak slowly and jerkily works his way to the back of the transport, popping the back door and sighing a little in pleasure at the feel of the chill on his feverish skin. He takes a step out and moves to shut the transport door behind him, but Emily _bips_ at him quietly, her purple optical square appearing to look up at him curiously. He gives her a slight nod, motioning for her to either choose to stay in or come out and join him, so she trundles out as well. He shuts the door and sinks down on the ground next to the transport, too tired to stand or lean upright against the side of the thing. Emily settles in next to him surprisingly delicately. He knows how clumsy the bot is, but she’s being careful even with her one trick leg.

He throws an arm over her dome and leans on her, just because… because it seems like the thing to do.

They stare up at the sky, the smattering of stars still somewhat foreign to him. It will take time to map the stars, learn their place in the grand scheme of the universe. He finds that he’s looking forward to it actually. Travelling through space had been a minor thrill for him before all of this, a small period of solitude and quiet, and a time to just enjoy the beauty of everything outside of his ship.

He's not sure how long they sit there for, and he may have dozed off at one point based on the dryness of his throat and mouth, but he pauses in his cataloguing of the stars to furrow his brow. In the far distance, a thin line of light blooms in the sky. In motion, it’s more blue-green and changeable, wiggling and waffling along its arcs. It’s too far away to really discern anything about it besides the fact that it is happening.

“I hope that you are seeing that too,” Hordak rasps, patting Emily gently. She bwoops softly, wiggling a little under his arm and he smiles. “We will have to inform Entrapta tomorrow. Perhaps she’ll want to investigate,” he yawns widely, and shakes himself. He has a cramp along his thigh and parts of his lower back have fallen asleep from sitting here for so long. He still needs to scrub off the excess sweat of his dreams, and even though it is hardly worth returning to bed considering the early hour, he should try to rest again.

* * *

Hordak is wrung out and irritable come morning. Entrapta shoves him off to nap more, which he only agrees to after informing her about the strange lights he and Emily had observed the night before. She reviews the footage as he blinkers down at the two of them, and ultimately just sends the recording off to Adora and the rest of the Princess Alliance with their coordinates at the time.

“It’s interesting! But we need to prioritize!” she points, and then giggles a little at herself, “well, try to, at least.”

Hordak’s response is notably slower, a soft rumble of a chuckle after a moment and she rolls her eyes. “ _Sleep_ , I’ll drive today.”

He rests, dozing mostly. His chest feels rather like he’d laid down and let some hoofed beast stomp all over it, and his sleep shirt has little runs and tugs through it now from where he’d clutched at his chest. He’d dug into the flesh around his cerebral port enough to draw blood too, so there’s an awkward scab along the side of it that hurts sharply if he manages to turn or twist just right.

Sometime in the afternoon, he’s woken by a loud beeping from the transport’s dashboard. Entrapta’s driving a little too fast, as she usually does, scuffing and barking off protrusions and the like in the way. There’s no road here, she just appears to be following along the seaside to keep her bearings. The surrounding environment has changed from dry desert to the more severe craggy landscape of Dryl, but there’s an unusual chill to the air, likely due to how far south they are.

“Are we being attacked?” Hordak grunts, rubbing his head and covering his ears slightly in annoyance.

“Nope!” Entrapta grins, turning back to look at him as he lurches forward to lean into the cockpit, holding himself upright by hanging onto Hector’s co-pilot seat. “I called one of our crates to come meet us, and that’s it getting close enough to signal us!” she keeps not looking out at the scenery in front of the transport, peering curiously at the display on the dash and Hordak yelps as they nearly drive into a sharp ridge. She lurches the transport left, away from the ridge, and Hordak pants a little, his slightly raised heartbeat just a little more painful than usual.

“W-why did you call a crate?” he asks, now holding onto the back of Entrapta’s chair to brace himself too. Hector is belted into the co-pilot seat and seems quaintly interested in the proceedings, peering at the red dot pinging on the radar.

“So, we can send the refrigerated goods back to the Crypto Castle! And other things too. I had them send us some of my tools and scrap so that we can upgrade the transport to get us out to the Demo—dema? The ships!” she beams up at him, and he swallows thickly and jerks with his head for her to return her attention to the road.

“You found them, then?” he asks, and she roughly turns and skids the transport to a hard stop. Something in the distance is rumbling through the ground, leaving a noticeable ridge in the ground as it barrels towards them. “Entrapta?” Hordak asks, his hearts picking up. There are very large sand worms that he’s aware of in the Crimson Waste, plus her stories of the frost worms from the Northern Reach. “Entrapta, we should—”

She appears to ignore him and pops open the door on her side of the transport and walks out to apparently greet the burrowing thing, hands outstretched. Hordak’s breathing a little heavily, and gives Hector a bit of a wild look, but Hector points out towards Entrapta to redirect his attention.

Something large and metallic erupts from the ground near her, thankfully not near enough to squish her, but near enough that she backpedals a little. It lands liked a beached whale with a thud, the drill bore slowly winding down, the gears squealing and whining from the pressure they’d been under. The drill is worn down and shorn back by the rough terrain in places, he can tell that even from this far away. His first reaction is anger that she would think this was appropriate considering the permafrost in the ground here, or the hardness of her terrain’s dirt, not to mention the giant _worms_ that lived in the ground that this might arouse the interest of… but he fumbles off the emotion with a sigh, too tired and worn down by his throbbing hearts to invest in a tantrum.

“I suppose that’s the crate, then,” he huffs, and Hector looks back at him.

Entrapta’s darting around the crate, making intrigued and soothing noises alternatively as she pokes at the wear and tear on the outside of the crate. The crate’s internal mechanisms are still ticking softly and releasing steam occasionally; it seems to sigh as she finally opens it up. Hordak’s points are all made for him by Entrapta herself as she rapidly catalogues into her recorder about how she really should make an above-ground version in the future if she’s going to be having the crates travel through Dryl.

“Oh good, the contents weren’t effected at least!” she bounds into the interior of the crate which must be quite hot based on the heat and steam wafting around. She coughs and pushes her mask onto her face, but she has to retreat after a moment.

“I’ll have to make it go back above ground, it would cook the preserves,” she huffs, using a few hair tendrils to wave at the visible waves of hot air billowing from the interior.

“That is a good idea,” Hordak sighs, and ends up inhaling a lungful of stale, hot air and devolving into a coughing fit. Hector catches his arm before he tumbles to the ground and supports him as he recovers.

“Well, let’s get started!” Entrapta grins.


	3. Chapter 3

Between Frosta and Mermista’s descriptions of where the ships were, Entrapta’s got a fair approximation of where to look. Hector and Hordak are putting together a few scouts just to help her hone in on the location a little better, Hordak putting together the interior important bits while Hector wedges together the chassis for them once he’s done. They work mostly in silence, and seem reasonably efficient.

They’d spent some time moving inventory between the transport and the cargo crate, and with a few quick modifications, she sent the crate back to the Crypto Castle. Entrapta’s working on the transport again, making sure it’s seaworthy since they’re going to have to go a fair ways out into the ocean to find the ships. She’s also made floatation devices for herself and Emily, just in case.

“Wait, can you swim?” Entrapta pokes her head out of the engine casing to look over at Hordak and Hector as they exchange drone pieces.

“Swim?” Hector frowns, while Hordak purses his lips in thought.

“No?” Hordak squints a little. “We sink in water. It is… unpleasant.”

“Oh,” Entrapta looks between the two of them as Hector gives Hordak a curious look. “I guess with the ports and everything else, you wouldn’t naturally float.”

“If we were investigating an aquatic planet, or a planet with a toxic atmosphere, Prime had an apparatus that would help us breathe, but it did nothing to help us float or swim,” he gestures a little towards his shoulders, which really doesn’t help clarify anything. She gives Hector a slightly curious look, but Hector shakes his head no.

“Wait, if you weren’t—how’d you know about that Sch—Schmaazz? Thing?” she quirks her head at them, beginning to tap at her data pad with potential ideas of clone floaties.

Hector looks a little guilty, and Hordak huffs faintly, shoving another partially finished scout towards him. “The hivemind. Even when a clone is gone, their memories live on through others visiting and reliving them,” he sighs. “Prime is dead, there is no shame in acknowledging such things.”

“Of course, brother,” Hector mumbles a little, toying with some of the hunks of the chassis in his lap. “I… did not get to experience much on the ship,” he offers softly.

“Ah,” Hordak nods. “The flagship crew are—w-were...” he pauses, clearly about to recite some clone theologism and stopping himself. “There is nothing wrong with that, Hector. You are here now.”

Hector smiles a little tightly at first, but at Hordak’s open and nonjudgmental expression his tension eases. “Thank you, brother.”

* * *

It takes a little bit of trial and error as she vastly underestimates their weight at first and Hector yelps and goes completely under even with the floaties. Thankfully, they’re just experimenting in the shallows, and she’s able to pull him out with her hands and hair. Today her hair is uncharacteristically cooperative, even when wet! Should she be keeping a journal to keep track of this? Was she being affected by the magical quirks of Etheria as well?

“Go on, I’m not taking us out until I know your floaties work,” she makes a shooing motion at Hordak as he stares at the black water with trepidation. He slowly and methodically steps out until he’s waist deep, whereupon he pauses.

“Everything alright?” she calls. Hector’s still huddled in a towel next to her and the day-moons are going to set soon. It is really chilly here, but she has Emily warming towels in the interior of her dome for when they come out of the water. Water is seeping up the back of Hordak’s turtleneck, and she can see some of the muscles of his back twitching. He’s been wearing such baggy clothes since he came back from Prime, but it’s clear that he’s still very underweight. Hector is lean and muscular, but Hordak was always hardly more than a thin veneer of muscle over bone. It’s distressing to see that he can go thinner than that.

“Are you okay?” she calls again as Hordak keeps standing waist-deep in the shallows, the small push and pull of the waves tugging his shirt gently back and forth. He doesn’t respond, just trails a hand through the black water and considers the fluid as it sluices through his fingers with his back and neck visibly tense. She starts as Hector passes her, having dropped his towels to start plodding in after him. “Hey! Wait!” she calls as Hector clumsily approaches Hordak.

Hector puts an arm around Hordak’s shoulder, causing him to jump. He turns with a sharp snarl on his lip, but Hector murmurs something softly to him that causes the expression to fall off abruptly. He looks away sharply, something like his angry-at-himself or ashamed expression flicking there before she loses access to his face.

“Do I need to come out there?” Entrapta calls, tilting her head and pushing another couple of towels into Emily’s dome now that Hector’s going to need more.

“I am fine,” Hordak’s voice is a little thready, “come on.” They take a few more steps deeper into the water, Hector keeping close enough to bump Hordak slightly, the rubber of the black balloons of the floatation devices she’s outfitted them with squeaking as they rub against one another. They make it to the same point that Hector had where they can drop a little and attempt floating. When he doesn't immediately sink, Hordak starts treading water very awkwardly, just like Hector had.

“Looks good!” she calls from the shore. “Come back before it gets too cold!”

Once they return to shore, Hordak takes two of the towels and roughly dries himself off and begins stalking off to the transport with purpose, avoiding looking at anyone. Hector settles in on the shore next to her again, cuddled into a few warmed blankets and happily watching the colors of the sky change with the moonset.

“Hector,” Hordak calls sharply from the transport after a few moments. “Come here,” his tone is commanding and harsh, but Hector pulls his towels close to him and gets up to investigate nonetheless.

“What’s up?” Entrapta follows the clone, finding Hordak pulling on a clean, dry shirt.

“You should—oh,” he turns to frown at Entrapta, but he returns his attention to Hector, “you need to change out of your wet clothes and maintain your ports. The water from the ocean isn’t clean.”

“Oh,” Entrapta’s eyebrows shoot up, “I hadn’t considered that. You have to keep your ports clean?”

Hordak steps outside and pulls her along to give Hector some privacy. “Yes. They are open cavities, after all,” Hordak gestures slightly, looking tired.

“Are they always open?” she asks curiously, “I thought you’d be able to close them.”

He shrugs a little, leaning back against the transport with a small sigh. “We can close them a little, but not completely.”

“Really? How does that work?” she bounces a little next to him, and he regards her for a moment then tucks his chin down as he seems to consider his body for a second. He lifts his shirt a little to expose his gut ports to her.

“I’m not sure how to describe… how? But this is them closed,” he gestures at the metal sockets, the interior of them a dull purple. There’s a barely discernible muscle movement, deep under the surface perhaps, and then the two sockets near her bloom out in color, a red glow suffusing them from within, “and that is open, completely.” He winces a little, gives the sea spray a dirty look and the red cuts out and returns to dull purple again.

“I capped them off in my armor to keep dirt and other contaminants out,” he drops his shirt over the ports and crosses his arms over his chest, turning his eyes up to the stars beginning to peek out of the darkening sky.

“Wow,” she pats his hip with a hair hand, wanting to investigate the ports more but doing her best to be respectful. He’s more than a little prickly today. “We’ll make sure to cover them up!” she says, wanting to lean against him but instead she pulls herself up to sit on top of the transport near his head. “Sorry if that was… too invasive?”

Hordak shrugs slightly, but doesn’t offer anything more, still looking up at the sky, so she turns her face up to join him. Hector emerges from the transport a few minutes later with a few snack packs and a package of food for her.

“It’s time for dinner, right?” he smiles a little sheepishly, offering the goods forth.


	4. Chapter 4

While they sleep, the scouts manage to find something that is most likely the ships. The scouts can only go so high altitude-wise, but five of them run into giant icicles or icebergs that are so enormously tall that their tips are hidden by the fog, and, unusually, there appears to be something arcing from the tips and shadowing the water and icebergs beneath them. Usually there’d just be a tiny tip to the iceberg up there and clear skies, but not here. The continent that the Kingdom of Snows rests on is much farther south than the coordinates she’s looking at, so it’s unlikely to be any other manmade structure. She’s hoping at least.

The water’s a bit choppy today, and she has the transport seated directly in the water so that they can conserve aircraft fuel for once they get to the ships. If they are really so high up in the air, it will be tricky to get up to them and she’s going to need all the fuel that they have.

Slips of abandoned ice floes bob in the water around them, and even with her increased insulation and other concessions to the cold, the inside of the transport is nearly cold enough to see their breath. They have all bundled up in most of the clothes that they’ve packed, and Emily is sitting centrally in the transport hold with her dome slightly open to warm everyone with her heat venting.

The fog is thick out here, and she’s mostly driving by the radar and her other sensors. At some point, Hordak replaced Hector in the co-pilot seat because he could give better supplementary directions just from experience. He’s frowning at his data pad as he’s comparing the coordinates and maps to what’s showing on the dashboard when a low, deep metallic groaning comes some from somewhere ahead of them. They freeze and glance at each other and Entrapta jitters a little, beaming.

“That didn’t sound like ice!!” she wiggles, and presses down the accelerator harder as Hordak huffs and shakes his head. The icebergs and glaciers out here do creak and make loud cracking noises, but that had been a little different sounding. Hordak makes a few alterations to their course, and considers his various displays. The fog doesn’t clear, but something large begins to coalesce in the light and dark in front of them. There’s another metallic moan and creak that ends in a screeching and squealing as something unhinges, and they watch in silent trepidation as something much larger than the transport they’re currently in slowly falls from far above and splashes into the sea. A large wave roars at them, and she jolts the transport into hover mode a second too late. They go under the dark water for a moment and the engine splutters and dies as things go completely dark.

“I-I don’t like this,” Hector whimpers from behind them as they bob out of the water after a moment, icy-cold water frothing at their feet before filtering through the recently installed drains.

“We’re here! I think!” Entrapta cackles, and Hordak peers up at the darkened shapes above them.

“I don’t think this one above us will be able to fly us anywhere, based on that,” he sighs, aligning the maps and redirecting the handful of scouts they have out helping with their poor visuals. It appears that there are three ships out here, which is a standard scouting party according to Hordak and Hector, likely looking for the proper location to put down a base. “It does appear to be the one that will be easiest for us to get up to, though,” he gestures at a three-dimensional map of the ships, cobbled together from the limited arrays from the scouts. The one that’s losing pieces is spiked through with five or six large icicles, and it is slowly coming apart and sinking into the sea.

The others, farther east from their location, are sitting a little higher on the ice spikes from Frosta, as far as they can tell.

“Well, let’s go!” Entrapta yanks the stick shift around and reengages the hover drive now that the diagnostics have declared it no longer waterlogged just to make sure that it’s still functional, and then plops them back into the ocean to barrel towards their destination. It takes some time to get truly close enough to the iceberg to be under the ship, driving home exactly how large these structures are in comparison to them. Once she gets close, she and Hordak puzzle a little about how best to use the fuel and surfaces available to hover and fly up to their destination. The hovering of the craft will be the most reliable in this case, and it relies on pushing back against a surface, so they map out a route to slowly climb up the sides of one of the icebergs.

She has to angle the transport very steeply, and very slowly lurch up an icy spike that’s perhaps six meters wide, if that, all the while worrying that their ascent may dislodge some of the spike or that debris will fall down at them and knock them back. As she powers forward at a stable rate and angle, the transport jerks and loses a few feet, but she manages to scramble and keep it aligned and moving upwards. It goes on like that for a while, making a few yards of progress and trying to turn the backslides into just pauses and not a complete loss of altitude and progress. Her jaw aches from clenching it, her shoulders feel locked in place, and they’re at an angle that’s pressing them all back into their chairs. She’s coiled her hair around her chair, with some of it held at the ready around the variety of controls that she’s installed and enabled on the transport, and it’s surprisingly difficult to hold her hair tendrils steady near the buttons and pull switches. She’s never seen her hair exhibit an over-extended muscle tremor before, but that’s what it appears to be doing at the moment.

The bottom of the ship begins to come into view above them. It is dark gray, most of the hull bent back exposing the internal workings which look a bit familiar from what’s left of Hordak’s old ship in the Fright Zone.

“How are we going to get in?” Hector peers up at it, his claws digging into the back of Entrapta’s chair as he keeps himself and Emily from sliding back into the transport. The angle is getting to the point that some of the things left unstrapped down are beginning to clatter back into the closed rear exit of the vehicle noisily.

“It appears that the interior is mostly caved in,” Hordak peers at some of the readings from the scouts, a few of them hitching a ride on their transport to give them more visual data. “We can’t activate the tractor beam externally anyway, but there’s a cavity there that we could—” he points forward towards a gap near where the spike that they’re on is punctured through and the transport jerks as the texture of the spike changes and thins beneath them, some of it perhaps splintering off or simply narrowing as they near its apex. There’s a terrifying moment of freefall as the hover drive struggles to find anything to push up against, and the vehicle begins to tip backwards until they’re nearly upside down and beginning to fall back. Hordak lurches forward in the co-pilot seat, his seatbelts ripping around him a bit in complaint, to dig his hand into some compartment under the dash and yank back on a pull switch of some sort. Three ropes shoot out from the front of the transport and there’s a sharp jerk as they get caught by the hooks Hordak’s just launched up into the husk of a ship above them. The Demitasse groans and dips a bit with the added weight, and they swing back away from the ice spike for a moment before they begin to swing back on a direct collision course with it.

Entrapta jerks into gear and quickly engages the flight engine and very nearly lurches them straight through the iceberg in her haste to reorient. She pushes them back and the hooks and rope get dislodged and swing back at them, clattering and destroying one or two of the scouts limpeted on them.

“I forgot I put that in!” she gives Hordak a shaky smile, and he grunts, trying to get settled back in his seat with the seatbelts engaged and pinning him in now.

“Get us up there, now, Entrapta,” he grumbles as she shakes her head to clear it and begins angling the transport up into some sort of opening into the hull, likely the one Hordak had been pointing out earlier.

“I am just glad that worked,” Hordak exhales shakily, pushing his hair out of his face, as they return to a more natural angle, settled in the remains of the hull.

She switches to the hover drive once they get inside the ship, although it is as Hordak predicted, there’s very little of the internal, inhabitable ship left. The hull is smashed in on itself as a small teenage girl took out all of her excess feelings upon it, as far as she can tell. Entrapta uses rope and carabiners to create safety leads for all of them so that they can explore a little of the internal cavities of the hull. There’s a lot of free space that’s just there to create the strange, arrowhead shape of Prime’s ships that really doesn’t seem to have any true purpose.

Hordak sends one of the remaining scouts to poke around the remains of the ship they’re in while Entrapta tries to get her bearings on the other two ships.

The one next to them is just far away enough that it’s mostly eaten by the fog, but she can tell that it’s in a little better shape than the one they’re in from what little she can see of it. For one, it still looks at least somewhat arrowhead shaped! It’s really too far to get a good hovering leap onto, though. They’re going to have to fly over to it, but that might not be the best thing since there’s another ship to investigate past it. Not to mention getting back down. She’s chewing on her lip, considering the hook and rope ejector that she’d forgotten about and how she could potentially grapple-hook her way over to the new ship, when the ship around them groans again, and the surface they’re on dips a few more inches.

“Come on! We’re just gonna have to use the fuel and hover down if things get dicey!” she carefully walks back to the transport, helping Hordak and Hector back in as well. Once everyone’s strapped back in, she powers up the transport and hovers up as high on the Demitasse as she can get. It appears that Frosta may have dived into the top of the ship as well leaving large craters in the hull. Not great for maintaining the integrity of the ship, but the dents do allow her a ramp up on top of the ship in some places.

Entrapta manages to wrangle her way up to a point that she feels comfortable vaulting the transport off of, and takes a few deep breaths in preparation.

“You are strapped in, yes?” she hears Hordak call back to Hector who grunts an affirmative, and she’s vaguely aware of Hordak’s clawed hands harshly gripping the arm rests in anticipation.

She guns the accelerator and lets the transport arc off of the ship for a moment before engaging the engine, coasting forward on the freefall. Once the engine comes on, she has to keep her attention split between the tiny fuel gauge and the fog-shrouded ship ahead of them.

As they get closer, it’s clear that the second Demitasse has taken a few hits as well, but apparently Frosta focused most of her efforts on the ship they’d just left. The damage on this one mostly appears to be from the original spikes torn through it, and with it less beaten up, she can tell that it must have been going at quite a speed when Frosta had pierced the ship because of the lateral rips torn through the hull trailing the ice spikes’ entry points.

After a few nerve-wracking minutes of eyeing the fuel gauge, they get close enough that she begins aligning them to a proper angle to begin hovering and eventually landing near the center of the ship. They jolt upon making contact with the other ship but it doesn’t seem as reactive as the first one, remaining somewhat stable in spite of the new added weight. They pause for a moment, parked on the hull, just ensuring that it's safe enough to leave the transport and that things aren’t going to suddenly go sideways.

The top of this ship does not have the pummeling craters of the other one, just some iciness from the environment and the icicles pierced through parts of the ship. Before Entrapta finishes setting up the leads, Hordak has wandered out of the transport and leaned down to start pulling at something. It appears to be a handle of some sort, as he strains for a moment but eventually the hatch flips open, ice spraying around it. He peers in for a moment before looking up and gesturing to follow as he begins climbing down what appears to be a ladder.

Hector scrambles down after and as she follows she has a strange sense of a déjà vu for some of the vents around the Fright Zone.

Hector seems a little overwhelmed and shy, sticking back to wait for her and Emily, and looking around wide eyed. It's as cold if not colder inside the ship, and their breath comes out in clouds in front of their mouths. Hector seems to be toying with that, holding his breath and exhaling in big plumes and looking amazed that it keeps happening.

Further in she can hear Hordak clunking around and occasionally making what sound to be appreciative hums. She peers around wide-eyed at the inside of the ship, familiar and not at the same time, though nothing is currently powered on. As she enters what appears to be the main hold, she finds the culprit behind the temperature: a hole smashed through the front window, vaguely person shaped. It’s aligned with what appears to be the captain’s chair, but she doesn’t see any corpse or body parts out on the hull. There’s a bit of cloth from a clone uniform on the hole to further prove her theory, though.

“Shouldn’t this window be reinforced?” she asks, looking around for some sheets of metal or something to patch the hole and perhaps restore some thermoregulation to the room.

Hordak looks up from where he’s poking at a panel in the wall with Hector curiously looking over his shoulder.

“It is,” Hordak walks across the cockpit to where she’s standing, “but a clone moving at near-spaceflight speeds, not wearing his seatbelt?” He gives her a slightly disapproving smirk.

“Ah,” Entrapta nods. “Do you think it’ll be capable of spaceflight again?” she turns towards him with a bright look.

“It’ll take a lot of patching, but the engine seems untouched,” Hordak offers.

* * *

She and Hector manage a small patch job on the window using some parts from around the ship. Hordak ends up ensconced in various wall panels, attempting to correct snapped connections while enabling a manual mode. The ships are usually piloted with a haptic interface which he can’t interact with thanks to his missing arm ports. They’ve already confirmed that the medical machinery is on board and in good condition, but without being able to engage the engine, they’re currently stuck.

“Was your old ship like this?” Hector asks, peering up at some exposed wires in the ceiling.

“The model’s changed some,” Hordak grunts, yanking out a splay of wires under the captain’s chair and rewiring a circuit board for the fourth time.

“You’d think that there’d be an easier way to engage the engine than this,” Entrapta huffs, peering over his shoulder and watching him reroute the connections again. She’s watched him do it the first two times, and it’s apparent that there’s some failsafe knocking the power off each time. She’s following some of the cabling from the front control panel back to figure out if she can find a way to hardwire it herself.

“It’d be dangerous if any non-clone could walk in and just—” Hordak grunts as he pushes himself up to try booting the engine again, “make off with the ship. This technology is too valuable.”

“Hmm,” Entrapta mutters, a stray cable pursed in her lips as she digs around in a compartment on the ceiling. Hordak keys into the first screen that asks for a port-sync, and attempts to force his way through it again. There’s a soft _vnnn_ as the system powers up and then down again, locking him out, and Hordak snarls and punches the dash in front of him. Entrapta winces in sympathy, but pauses and glances at Hector as an idea occurs to her.

The right tool for the job, right?

She plops off of the ceiling and waltzes up to the side of the captain’s chair that Hordak’s angrily flumped himself into, rubbing his browbone. “Couldn’t we just use Hector’s?”

Hordak’s eyes open and he looks at the floor for a moment before turning towards Hector. “It might give the user some feedback, with the hivemind in the state it is in,” he quirks a brow at Hector in question.

“I mean, would it be worse than plugging him into a random wall port on Krytis?” she bobs a little on her hair in front of Hordak, and his face flashes through a myriad of expressions in quick succession, landing on something like disbelief and anger.

“You did what?” he asks, his tone guarded. “Krytis—” he grunts in pain and grits his teeth as something painful flares along his neck, or so she guesses based on how he clutches there.

“We visited Krytis and that is where we found Catra’s companion animal!” Hector steps up, beaming, as Hordak continues to growl through something painful.

“Krytis does not exist,” he snarls, pinching the bridge of his nose, and hissing his pain through his teeth.

“It does! Prime lied to us, Krytis was a failure! I know, brother, it took me some time too,” Hector pats Hordak’s arm reassuringly, but Hordak rears back out of the chair.

Somehow Hordak manages to snag Hector’s shirtfront and backs him up against the controls against the far wall, looming large over him in spite of their shared height. “ _It was not a failure!_ ” he roars, and there’s strange flares of static and bits of the controls lighting up around the two of them. “ _It—_ ” he pants a little and seems startled by his own grip on Hector’s shirtfront. He scrambles back, putting as much space as he can between himself and the other clone. “It’s. It’s…” he pinches his nose again, breathing heavily, “It’s not real.”

“Well… we went there. So, it _is_ real,” Entrapta cautiously walks over to Hector to check him over, now that Hordak’s stumbled back away from him, leaning against the side of captain’s chair. Hector mostly seems slightly rattled from what she can tell with a cursory look. “Data doesn’t lie! I could pull up the star map of it on my data pad, or I could take you there with Darla! That seemed to do it for Hector,” she pats Hector’s arm reassuringly and peers over at Hordak. He looks utterly dumbfounded, staring at the two of them in confusion.

He swallows, and takes a few deep breaths, rubbing his chest now. “Of… course,” he says, looking at her, perhaps grounding himself or just trusting that she wouldn’t lie to him about something like this. He clears his throat, “You went to—there and plugged Hector into something?”

“Yes! He was able to pull records on Krytis for us!” she beams, and gestures widely. “It’s lucky there was a ship or something with logs available for us to look at, really, now that I think about it,” she rubs her chin. “Do you think this ship has logs like that? Do these ships have black boxes?”

“Ah, well,” Hordak takes a shuddering breath and seems to steady himself mentally with another shake of his head. “Yes, but I doubt they'll be useful. Uhm. Hector, you’ve… you never interacted with the ships?”

“No,” Hector shakes his head definitively.

“Well, you may be able to get it started, I suppose,” Hordak sighs, rubbing his hair out of his face. “If, uhm…” Hordak adjusts himself off of the side of the captain’s chair and walks to the far side, “you’ll have to sit here and place the connector in your arm.” He makes a small motion of pushing something into a spot near the middle of where the void in his arm would be. “It’s not as uncomfortable as some of the others,” he adds softly.

He gestures at the chair, and takes a few respectful steps back, wary of the fact that he’s likely spooked his fellow clone again

Hector eyes Hordak, but doesn’t seem to be particularly put out. He looks over the captain’s chair and dusts it off a bit before settling in and beginning to search around for the connector.

“Ah, uhm, it’s—” Hordak tries to point for a moment before sighing and stepping forward to pull the strange green cabling from within the back of the chair on the right side. He offers it to Hector who takes it, and after rolling back his several sleeves, merrily jams it into the port on his right arm making Hordak wince slightly.

The screen that Hordak had been interacting with earlier pops on and begins running through the initializing sequence as the ship hums on around them.

“Oooh! It’s working!” Entrapta comes forward to peer at the connection to Hector’s arm, and as she’s watching a greenish keypad interface appears around his hands and wrist and the ship groans and sluggishly jerks them forward.

“Wait!” Hordak grabs Hector’s arm and yanks it down and back, from where he’d apparently been gesturing them up and forward. “Keep-keep your arm still, just a moment,” Hordak breathes, and walks back up to the front of the ship to type into the controls manually. He keys in a few things, the odd language of Prime’s neural network quickly spooling back and forth on the screen before he returns to the screen to set up manual control again that she’s familiar with. It accepts his input this time, and Hordak sighs in relief.

“Try removing the connector?” Hordak calls, and Hector carefully does, jostling it back and forth a little as if it might be a little warped. The ship remains humming around them even without it connected. “Good,” Hordak taps a few directives into the screen, and a diagnostic screen pops up showing all of the damage to the ship. He hums a little, poking at some pieces of the ship on the screen and reading the strange spooling words that accompany the display.

“Can you teach me uh, whatever language that is?” Entrapta asks, gesturing at the screen as he appears to be reading something about one of the thrusters in the back of the ship.

“Hm?” he pauses, shaking his head and turning to her. “Oh, the hm,” he squints a little with a wince, and she frowns. He seems to have a lot more flares of pain than he used to. Hopefully the armor will help with that. “It’s… difficult to verbalize, but I can try translating some of it into writing,” he taps the manual haptic display keys to get to a read out on what is likely fuel storage or something like that based on the gauges. “With what you did to Prime, I imagine you already understand some of it.”

“Well, uh,” Entrapta wiggles a little back and forth on her hair. “It’s always easier with a natural speaker! I made myself a dictionary of the First One’s language, and I was able to translate most of it on my own, but I found out that I made some silly mistakes when I talked to Adora later,” she rubs the back of her head sheepishly. He nods, conceding her point.

“Oh, wait, don’t you have that translator, actually? You used it on your food data base!” she points at him victoriously and he chuckles.

“That’s… it was just encrypted. I used… this,” he gestures a little at the screen with a little discomfort, and she realizes that if they don’t verbalize whatever this language is, it also probably doesn’t really have a name that he can use, “as a template, but what you’d see on the screen without unencrypting it would be gibberish.”

“Oh!” she swings a little on her hair. “That’s really neat! Oh, it all move so fast,” she boosts herself up to watch the symbols scroll back and forth, still on the fuel gauge screen. There’s a pattern to it, but it’s too complex to follow without sitting down to really focus on cracking it and she’s more interested in getting the ship up and running at the moment.

“It’s… communicating a lot of data,” Hordak offers, squinting again. “It’s an attempt at… condensing what could be given to you if you were connected to the hivemind.”

“Woooah,” she watches the text scrawl back and forth again with wide eyes.

Hordak taps at the haptic interface again, and he makes a vaguely interested noise as a number of warnings pop up all over the screen. “It appears that the ship on our other side has already fallen into the sea, as Princess Mermista stated.”

“Oh! That’s not good,” Entrapta moves to the left side of the ship to peer out the window, but with the fog all she can really see is a few icebergs bobbing in the sea.

“Where should I take us down?” Hordak asks, and she feels the ship very slowly and gently begin to ascend and catch a little on the ice spikes still embedded in it.

“Uh,” Entrapta pulls out her data pad to pull up a map of her castle to figure out where she’s going to park something this size. “Can’t we just figure it out when we get there?”

“It’s going to take us a matter of minutes to get there,” Hordak gives her a dry smirk. “And we still need to move the transport inside the ship.”

“Oh, true,” she giggles. She turns the map around a few times, and then pokes at a spot alongside her castle, pointed such that they can exit the ship with the transport near the entrance to her castle, “How about here?”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are appreciated, even if I don't get back to you, I read them!
> 
> Come yell at me on [tumblr](https://daezdlo.tumblr.com/), if you like.


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